Це перший у третьому тисячолітті український переклад одного з вершинних творів Шекспіра. Сюжет п’єси побудований на історії легендарного короля Ліра, який на схилі життя вирішує відійти від справ і розділити своє королівство між трьома доньками. Для визначення розмірів їхніх часток він просить кожну з них сказати, як сильно вони його люблять. Дві старші охоче вправляються у лестощах, а наймолодша — Корделія — відмовляється лестити, кажучи, що її любов вища за слова. Розгніваний батько зрікається молодшої доньки і проганяє графа Кента, що намагався заступитися за Корделію. Лір ділить королівство між старшою і середньою доньками. Невдовзі він з гіркотою усвідомлює їхнє жахливе лицемірство, але це його прозріння надто запізніле...Наше видання підготували два знакові майстри сучасного українського культурного простору — письменник Юрій Андрухович та ілюстратор Владислав Єрко. Їхня версія «Короля Ліра» — це щаслива нагода пережити геніальний твір по-новому, гостро відчути його вічну актуальність.
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Happy 456th to The Bard.
Insults, Sex Ed, and Life Lessons I have now entered what may be considered cliche English teacher territory. You were forced to read Shakespeare in school. As a grown up, it's okay to return to him. In fact, at any age Shakespeare's plays and poetry do what all literature should do. They offer us a doorway to ponder essential questions we all ask and attempt to answer. I do not, nor should you, care so much about metaphor or symbolism. While those things may be interesting, they aren't what's most exciting about reading. The silly joy felt at bedtime when your Dad read Green Eggs and Ham. The tummy ache you felt along with the hungry caterpillar as he indulged in junk food that crazy Saturday. All of that wonder and delight are possible in Shakespeare without analyzing text the way pretentious grad students do. I know because I was once one of them. Trust high school English teacher me. Trust love of literature me. Let the high school angst go. Read one of his plays voluntarily. His work is not pretentious or condescending. Shakespeare is entertainment for the masses. He is Netflix or your local movie house. No tuxedo or fruity British accent required. Make yourself some popcorn, and don your favorite sweatpants. You will not regret it. He has witty retorts for your enemies, the sting of which they will immediately comprehend:"Thou art like a toad; ugly and venomous." (As You Like It). You might enjoy those that can remain cryptic to a contemporary reader but be no less satisfying for you: “You rampallian! You fustilarian!” (Henry IV, Part II). Try it yourself. Click on the link below and use an insult generator. Go ahead. Someone's post on Facebook probably deserves a good zinger. Shout them at your neighbor's barking dog! Insults by Shakespeare Of course, Shakespeare is not all lighthearted ribbing. He deals with death, too, as our high school reading taught us. Hamlet grieves the loss of the father he loved so dearly and lost so suddenly. Devastated by his mother's "o'erhasty marriage," he suspects (correctly) that his uncle Claudius really is a "dammned villain." When his mother reminds him that all living things die, and asks Hamlet why it seems so particular with him, he tells he tells her: Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not "seems." 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath, No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, Nor the dejected havior of the visage, Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief, That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show, These but the trappings and the suits of woe. Hamlet, 1.2 All outward ways to show grief are so eclipsed by his actual suffering that he can't express it. He mourns the loss of his father. He watches his mother move on so quickly that his grief is intensified by loneliness, and the throne that should by all rights be his, is now occupied by a man who labels Hamlet's grief "womanish." These things are unbearable to Hamlet. I recalled this speech from Hamlet on the day I buried my grandmother. I knew that day would come, and at age ninety-two she fended off the inevitable for longer than most. As my cousins and I stood at the lectern in a small Catholic church where I had attended so many masses as a child, each of our voices broke. Words failed us. The responsorial psalm was "The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." I believe my grandmother to be in Paradise with no wants. However, like Hamlet, I was not. I still inhabited this "sterile promontory". Shepherd or not, I did want. I wanted my grandmother back. Why would we even be gathered together without her there? She was the matriarch. Who would make Easter bread for us? Who would talk with me in the early morning hours while the valley fog hung heavy around the farmhouse that she and my grandfather built? My grandmother walked me down the aisle at my wedding, and now I had to accompany her coffin to a quiet, small, terrifyingly final place in the ground and leave her there. Yet somehow the loneliness and finality of that moment was helped by having read so many accounts in fiction of characters who had losses akin to my own. I am not alone in any desperate state. Shakespeare has written my pain already. After all, by Act V even Hamlet becomes all Zen about things. He acknowledges to his best friend that he is about to walk into a death trap (literally). He may die at the hands of Laertes and evil Uncle/Father Claudius. He may not. However he concludes: "The readiness is all" (Hamlet, 5.2). And for any other trial in life on a lesser scale than death, Benedick's words always seem to enter my mind: "For man is a giddy thing...and this is my conclusion" (Much Ado About Nothing, 5.4). Then there is the love. Naive, easily deceived lovers (Claudio and Hero). Witty, snarky lovers (Benedick and Beatrice). Jealous love (Othello). Strong, devoted wives (Portia). Weak-willed hot messes (Gertrude). In high school the perennial Shakespearean love story is that of Juliet and her Romeo. It is not a love we would want for our sons and daughters. It is tragic. It is, as Juliet herself worries, "too rash, too unadvised," but it is the literary love all high school students encounter just as they enter the dating years. Don't get me started on how unattractive Romeo is, as boyfriend material, ladies, at least in the first Act of the play. Your true love should not be the Emo boy who sleeps all day, mopes all night, and allows his undying love for you to be extinguished the moment he sees the jewel in an Ethiop's ear that is Juliet. He needs an anti-depressant. He's probably cutting himself. He is certainly annoying his friends and worrying his parents. Someone should really write the story of Rosaline. She is my hero. Proud, strong and chaste, she rejects Romeo because she sees how weak he is. She tells Romeo she plans to live chaste, but I think it may be that she knows, no matter how many gentle or passionate protestations he gives to the contrary, there is something wishy washy in Romeo's love. Living chaste is just code for she's not that into you, young Montague. While all of Verona mourns the dead lovers, somewhere in that ancient Italian city, Rosaline is raising a glass of red to her own impeccable instincts. Perhaps she and Paris can marry. It's probably the perfect match. Neither of them seems like the type to take poison or stab themselves without thinking it through. It is possible, Dear Reader, that parenthood has unfairly altered my reading of this play. So why is there a Romeo and Juliet initiation into high school literature? Poetry is one answer. Light and dark imagery, bird imagery, references to the stars, the sun, the moon--it's all there. I defy you to read the balcony scene and not be moved at some point. It's the breathless, adoring way we all want to love and be loved. The tragedy can come later; carpe diem, young lovers. The play also allows students to identify with young people who are often powerless to follow their hearts in a world that rejects the idea of them as a couple. Juliet's relationship with her father goes from his strangely modern claim to Paris early on that he believes Juliet should not yet marry and that she deserves to have a say in her choice of husband to a threat to leave her dying in the streets without food, home, or inheritance if she does not marry Paris. Romeo and Juliet have even the stars conspiring to keep them apart. Romeo must deal with his bros teasing him about being in love. Juiet's Nurse helps the lovers, but when Juliet must face her father's ultimatim, she quickly advises Juliet just to marry Paris and forget she has another husband on earth. The world is unjust. Their parents don't understand them. It's us against the world, so no wonder their love is attractive to teens. Juliet's come night speech --filled with downright sexy, beckoning verse, yearning for her lover, for the cloak of darkness, for striking out against the oppressive forces that hinder young people--is racy rebellious. "Hood my unmanned blood bating in my cheeks./Come, night; come, Romeo, come" Romeo and Juliet 3.2 I wonder if the school boards across America would like to take some credit for giving ninth graders everywhere such lyrical reasons to rebel, not to mention the passionate, planned sex. After all Romeo makes arrangements for a wedding night ladder. He thought of everything. It's not like they are planning to paint Capulet's orchard walls, people! While we're on the subject, do those same school boards know that teaching Romeo and Juliet involves the following topics and many more like them? Every. Year. 1. Rude hand gestures around the world 2. Thrusting women against a wall and cutting off their maidenheads 3. Women growing bigger by men (pregnancy) 4. Breastfeeding 5. Wedding night sex Mercutio says these lines in the play: "...the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind boy's butt shaft"(2.4) and "...the bawdy hand of the dial is now on the prick of noon" (2.4) It does not matter what these lines actually meant to an Elizabethan audience. To fourteen year olds in 2014 America, they read only as dirty jokes. No matter how quickly I explain something as a reference to Cupid's arrow; their minds have gone some other where. Mercutio also makes fun of the older, overweight Nurse in the streets of Verona to the raucous approval of the other teen boys with him. Nice. We shall read that during fifth period and then head off to that anti-bullying assembly. All English teachers appreciate irony. Every year as I teach this play to the impressionable youth of America whose parents fret over curfews and Facebook posts, who put parental controls on the television and forbid their children to attend R rated movies, I appreciate irony. This is why I love the works of William Shakespeare. They speak to the human condition in all its messy, uncomfortable, often hilarious and awkward complexity. Love and sex go together. Young men enjoy a dirty joke. Young women fantasize about being intimate with their boyfriends. Not much has changed because what makes us human beings does not change. In a list of my favorite writers, Shakespeare will always be there, not because I am a pretentious academic who wants to impress you but because I am a human being. Notice I haven't addressed the difficulty of the language because it's really not that difficult and because you don't need to understand every word in every play or sonnet to feel Shakespeare speaks to you. My ninth graders tackle it with great success every year. Shakespeare isn't for tea and crumpets while wearing high heels and shiny nail polish. He is for breathing in mountain air, stomping around in muddy spring puddles, and sweating it out on a satisfying hike. Reading can be, should be, a journey that leads us to a better understanding of ourselves and the other selves around us. While hiking through the human condition, Shakespeare is a wonderful trail guide. You might think of Shakespeare's writing as the rich, dark chocolate you indulge in when no one is looking. He is the thirty year old glass of Scotch you drink at your grandfather's birthday. Shakespeare is all the delightful, precious, and fine possibilities in our language. Do not deny yourself that pleasure, Dear Reader. You deserve the best.
